Reviewed by Kaitlyn Smith
Venue: West Port Oracle
★★★★★ 5/5
With a title like 9/11 The Birds & The Bees, you probably already know this isn’t going to be a particularly safe hour of comedy. Sofia May knows exactly how far she’s willing to push an audience, and then quite happily goes a little further.
The show is set aboard a plane where the crew have been bound and gagged, which establishes the tone pretty quickly. At one point we’re told, “I learnt to fly, but not land,” and that probably tells you everything you need to know about the kind of journey you’re in for.
May’s comedy is dark and sometimes deliberately uncomfortable, and there were definitely moments where I wasn’t immediately sure whether a joke had landed, only for her to add another piece of context or finally reach the punchline and suddenly it was hilarious and i understood exactly where she was going with it. She isn’t afraid of allowing an awkward silence to sit for a little while, and with material this dark, that actually becomes part of what makes it work.
There is plenty of crowd work throughout too, and May is brilliant at reacting to the room rather than feeling completely tied to what she’s planned. At one point, someone in the front row seemed considerably less impressed than I was, but considering we’d all voluntarily walked into a comedy show called 9/11 The Birds & The Bees, I’m still not entirely sure what he was expecting.
Some of the strongest parts of the show come from May’s own experience of 9/11. She was in middle school just two blocks from the Twin Towers, close enough that other students at her school actually saw the planes hit, and she remembers the sounds, the building shaking and the fact that they weren’t initially evacuated. When the towers began to fall, they were eventually told to run for their lives, and these are obviously memories that carry a very different weight when you realise the person making the jokes was actually there.
Somehow, she manages to find comedy within that experience without making it feel as though she’s trying to make light of what happened. One of my favourite examples is her joke about the buddy system, something we had at school in Scotland too, where you’re taught that you absolutely have to stick with your buddy, only for a real emergency to happen and suddenly everyone is being told to run for their lives. As May puts it, the buddy system quite literally went out the window.
That’s where I think her comedy is particularly clever. There are jokes in the show that initially leave you wondering where she’s going with them, especially because of the subject matter, but she’ll then add another piece of information and suddenly the whole thing makes sense and becomes hilarious. It isn’t dark comedy for the sake of being controversial, and the title probably makes the show sound far more like that than it actually is.
The show moves through plenty of other memories from that day too, including people running past the school windows while looking back at the Twin Towers, which May compares to people running from Godzilla in a movie. It’s such an unexpected comparison, particularly given what was actually happening outside, but that’s exactly where May seems to find her comedy, in the strange details and observations that have stayed with her from an otherwise horrific day.
I’ve spoken to May since seeing the show and heard more about what happened that day and the story behind some of the material, and while I obviously won’t share everything we discussed, it gave me a much greater understanding of the show. These experiences were traumatic and being able to joke about them now doesn’t change that, but comedy has become an outlet for her and a way of telling those stories in her own way.
May has been through more than most, which becomes even more apparent when you realise her other Fringe show, The Buddhist Wears Prada, is about her experience of being in a cult. Yet she’s incredibly down to earth, and there isn’t a sense that she wants sympathy from the audience or that these experiences define her. She has somehow managed to take some genuinely awful and frankly bizarre things that have happened in her life and turn them into comedy, because sometimes your options really are to laugh or cry, and good on her for finding a way to laugh.
Even getting kicked out of therapy becomes material, because apparently nothing in Sofia May’s life is safe from eventually becoming a joke.
This was May’s second year performing 9/11 The Birds & The Bees at the Edinburgh Fringe, while The Buddhist Wears Prada made its Fringe debut this year, and between the two it’s pretty clear she isn’t going to be running out of material any time soon.
What I enjoyed most about 9/11 The Birds & The Bees is that underneath a title designed to make you do a double take is actually a very personal show. It’s bold, ridiculous and incredibly dark, and it definitely won’t be for everyone, but May doesn’t seem particularly interested in making comedy that will be for everyone anyway. That’s part of what makes her so good at it.
Since seeing the show, May went on to be longlisted and then shortlisted on our own “For The Plot” Awards show “The Edinburgh Independent Comedy Awards” before ultimately winning Best Stand-Up Comedy and having watched her perform, it’s very easy to understand why she stood out.
Sofia May is incredibly funny, completely unafraid of going somewhere uncomfortable and, importantly, knows how to turn that discomfort into an actual joke rather than relying on shock value alone. 9/11 The Birds & The Bees was easily one of my stand-out comedy shows of this year’s Fringe, and if it comes back for a third year, it’s not one to miss.
★★★★★
